


In Restless Dreams I Walked Alone

by aunt_zelda



Category: Geek & Sundry, Sagas of Sundry
Genre: Alcohol, Autoerotic Asphyxiation, Cutting, Drug Withdrawal, Gen, Hallucinations, Homelessness, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Drugs, Slut Shaming, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 05:13:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11525262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aunt_zelda/pseuds/aunt_zelda
Summary: During the past year, the five friends grew isolated and reacted to their trauma in various ways. What if they all had something in common, but that was something they won't discuss with each other.





	In Restless Dreams I Walked Alone

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know where this came from. All the speculation and theories for what happened to the characters during the past year got me thinking. And I wondered, what if they all, isolated and alone, had some very dark thoughts. 
> 
> I don't quite know what to make of this fic. But here it is. 
> 
>  
> 
> Repeating what the tags warn for, just in case, TRIGGER WARNING for: suicide attempts, suicide ideation, drug use, alcohol use, and cutting.

Raina doesn’t talk about this. 

Nobody back home knows. Nobody at college knows. 

There’s a bridge, near campus. Legend has it that it’s haunted. The ghost of a young bride, or a widow, or a girl who flunked her exams in the 60s … well, someone young and tragic and female haunts the bridge. 

Raina leans against the railing. It’s quiet at this hour. Chilly too. She regrets the ripped tights, they look good during the day but at night they’re pathetic against the cold. 

Darby would have loved it here. She’d have adored everything about this stupid boring little town and its history and its nature preserves and its haunted bridge. 

Raina climbs up and sits on the railing. She wonders if the ghost is watching her. She wonders if the ghost is lonely. She wonders what you have to do to become a ghost. 

The wind whispers through the trees, rattles parts of the bridge, flutters Raina’s hair. 

It sounds like it’s whispering a word. 

_Jump … jump … jump … jump …_

Raina crawls back over the railing and stomps back to her dorm. 

Her professor calls her series of paintings of water eerie, but repetitive, and gives her a passing grade. 

~*~

Kayden doesn’t talk about this.

None of his friends know. Not that he’s talked to them in a while. Are they his friends? Yes, of course, they are, but he can’t imagine they miss him all that much. 

He should have died. 

That’s what the shadows are telling him. 

The shadows move in strange ways. They taunt him. Reminding him of his weakness. 

They’re worse when he uses drugs. So he goes cold turkey. Then they laugh at him during his withdrawals. 

And then his head is clear and his mind is quiet and there’s a belt around his neck and he’s trying to attach it to the hook in the ceiling that used to hold up a lamp before he knocked it down one night. The chair he’s standing on his rickety because he scrounged it from a dumpster three months ago and one of the legs is going to break any day now, any day now.

He doesn’t think, he doesn’t wait for the shadows to insult him, he just steps into empty air. It’s easy. It’s so easy. 

Then it’s painful, and his hands are flailing and there’s awful gagging noises coming from somewhere. His lungs are on fire and his vision blurs.

He wakes up on the floor, cock hard and throat aching. A good chunk of the ceiling plaster fell along with the hook beside him. 

“Fuck it,” he mutters, and jerks off with hands that are still somewhat tingling with pins and needles.

~*~

Tanner doesn’t talk about this. 

He hasn’t heard from any of his friends in a while. He doesn’t care about Kayden, the asshole did drug them after all, but the girls he worries about. 

What if it wasn’t drugs. What if it was something out there. Something that they outran once. Something coming for them. 

Tanner’s dad has a gun. 

Tanner’s never seen it outside its case. 

One day Tanner takes it out of the case. He holds it, awed at how heavy it is. Far heavier than a camera. The metal is cold, and not quite consistently smooth. 

Tanner runs it over the side of his cheek, feels the imperfections. 

He doesn’t know how the safety works. He can assemble and disassemble a camera shutter in moments, but a gun is alien to him. 

Tanner puts the gun back into its case that night. 

Days later, he takes it out again. Runs it over his face once more. It feels good. It feels safe. It feels … final. 

He brushes the barrel of the gun against his forehead, just once, then panics and puts it back into its case. 

A week later, Tanner is drunk. He found an old reel of film from school and developed it: pictures of himself and the others smiling back at him, from another time, another world practically. 

Tanner uncorks a bottle and swigs from it. He unlocks the gun case and sets the gun on the table next to the bottles. He drinks. He thinks about Kayden’s smirk. He drinks. He thinks about Sat’s tight skirts. He drinks. 

The gun barrel tastes cold, a little coppery, vaguely like the chemicals he uses to develop film. 

His finger slips and pulls the trigger. 

… and nothing happens. 

Suddenly sober, he puts the gun back into its case and cleans up all the bottles. 

~*~

Darby doesn’t talk about this. 

She talks about everything else. The voices, the message, His words coming to her in the night. At first people are kind and listen to her, nodding every so often. Then they start to drift away. They leave her alone. Everyone leaves her. Like Raina. Like her friends. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about what happened. Except Darby. 

This all leaves Darby alone with her thoughts. Her thoughts are of Him. He’s trying to contact her, but He can’t get through. She’ll have to meet Him in the middle. 

She finds the book in the college library, deep in the books on mysticism and pagan rites and witches. It’s wedged between shelves and doesn’t have a checkout card or a printed plastic number on its spine. Darby smuggles it out under her jacket and sleeps with it under her pillow for seven nights. Her dreams are of fire and darkness and glowing eyes and mimicking laughter. 

In her parent’s basement Darby readies everything she needs. She gathers the candles, the sage, the goat’s blood, the chalk, the knife. 

Darby paints the symbols on the floor exactly as the book instructs. She lets them dry. She repaints. She scatters the sage. She lights the candles. She takes off her clothes and kneels in the center. There’s moonlight filtering in through the basement’s tiny window, illuminating her perfectly. 

Trembling, Darby readies the knife. She cuts her arms and legs as the diagrams in the book instruct her to. She cuts over the lines of her ribs. She pricks the back of her neck and her earlobes. 

Bleeding onto the floor Darby waits. 

And waits.

And waits. 

Darby wakes up in the morning, crusted with dried blood. She’s not an idiot, she knows how much blood a person can safely lose, and judging from the massive stain that’s completely wiped out the symbols on the floor, she knows she lost way too much. 

She ought to be dead. 

But she isn’t.

A sign then, from Him. 

~*~

Sat doesn’t talk about this. 

The OD was an accident, it really was. No matter how much the doctors try and push her, Sat doesn’t budge on that. She just wanted to get high. She didn’t want to die. 

“Didn’t” being the operative word there. 

Sat gets out of the hospital. Her parents change the locks and leave her a suitcase on the porch. She breaks into the garage and takes one of the old camping tents. Then she camps out in the woods by the park. 

It sucks. It rains. She gets sick. There’s no food. Sat finds homeless shelters and gets food, and her cough goes away, but then she gets lectures about religion and being a good woman. She doesn’t know what that means exactly but apparently, she’s not one if she ended up like this, according to them. Sat goes back outside with her tent. 

One night she lets someone else use her tent, an old guy who reminds her of the prospector. Sat finds the railroad tracks near the park. If she still had a sketchbook she’d draw it, but Sat doesn’t have one anymore. 

She stretches out along the wood and metal and it’s comfortable, weirdly. She bunches up her coat for a pillow. She’s heard the trains at night. She can’t remember if one’s due tonight or not. 

Sat wakes up in the morning coated in dew and shivering. 

She’s dried her tears by the time she gets back to her tent.


End file.
